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Where to start, in what order, and what to ignore for now.
The commonest way to fail at Hindi is to start in the wrong place. Almost every course opens with the alphabet, and the alphabet is not where the difficulty is — the difficulty is in your ear. Hindi distinguishes four sounds where English has one: क, ख, ग and घ are four separate letters and swapping them changes words. If you learn to write before you can hear that difference, you will read every word you meet with an accent you cannot detect and cannot later remove.
So the order that works is: sound, then script, then sentences, then grammar. Spend the first week on nothing but listening and imitation. Spend the second and third on Devanagari, which is phonetic, regular and far easier than English spelling once you accept that every consonant carries a built-in short 'a'. Only then start building sentences, and build them yourself rather than memorising phrases — a phrase you have memorised works exactly once, in the situation you rehearsed.
What to ignore at the start: the formal Sanskritic vocabulary of newspapers, the perfect distinction between तुम and तू, and any attempt at literary Hindi. What not to ignore: grammatical gender, which reaches into the verb and must be learned with every single noun from the first day. Learners who postpone gender spend a year unlearning it.
Reading gets you the grammar. Speaking is the part that only happens with another human. EkGuru tutors are native Hindi speakers in India who teach one to one over video — no group classes, no subscription.
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